Emoticon Calendar

On the whole, emoticons are not my favorite addition to the human sphere of communication. However, one time I really wanted to break things off with this girl and was dragging my feet about it for like a month until I finally sucked it up one day and sent her a "We gotta talk" text. It was along the lines of, "Hope you're well. I'll be home at 6. We should probably talk." Only somehow the auto recall/auto correct function on my phone replaced all of my periods with frownie faces. As in, "Hope you're well:-( I'll be home at 6:-( We should probably talk:-(" Oops. But she got the message. No further words required. It was the worst, yet also best, Freudian slip of all time. I tell you this story not because I am proud of it, nor because it gave me a new appreciation for emoticons, but so that should you find yourself in a similar situation down the line, you too can elicit the power of the frownie face.

In the interim, you can practice drawing them--along with smiley and semicolon and any other faces you desire--with this 365-day emoticon calendar. Part of Brigada Creativa's Life Calendar series, the assemblage of yellow and blue circles awaiting the telling dots, lines, and curves of a Sharpie will answer the question, "How was your day?" for an entire year. Admittedly, the calendar is a pretty tidy and concise way to synopsize the 12-month period, and might be interesting to look back on come December when everyone is feeling reflective and determined to change/be better/not hurl an unsavory melange of Champagne, blue cheese, and crab cakes into the CEO's bathroom sink at the company holiday party. And if emoticons are here to stay, a private, printed, wall-mounted calendar is really their ideal application because the person who probably cares the most about how you're feeling today--and the rest of the 364 days of the earth's revolution--is you.

Blue circles denote the start of a new month. Brigada Creativa notes that the calendar does not correspond to any specific year, but I will note that it cannot be used during a leap year because February has only 28 circles. Dimensions are 11.7" x 16.5".